Stories

Noam Ben-Ari wrote in to let us know about his new authentication library, which aims to build on the mistakes of the rest, called Sorcery. It's aim is to be simple, straightforward, and follow MVC separation principles.

Last Friday, OmniAuth version 0.2.0 was released. This update carries a bunch of enhancements including better testability and support for several new authentication providers including bit.ly, Flickr, Gowalla, Instagram, Netflix, and more.

While reCAPTCHA (and others) are quite nice for hosted CAPTCHA solutions, sometimes those processes are too critical to rely on a third party. If this is the case for you, maybe the Gotcha library by John Crepezzi will work for you. It ships with SumGotcha (correctly calculate simple sums) and BackwardsGotcha (type a random string backwards) and is fully self-contained.

View Resolvers are a new feature to Rails 3 and offer quite a bit of power and flexibility when used correctly. José Valim introduces them in his Crafting Rails Applications book, and last week, Jordan Phillips also wrote up how to use them on his blog while he migrated a Rails 2 application to Rails 3.

The Ruby #hash method is available on most objects and serves to (generally) identify a particular Object instance. But, those hashes often change in a multi-threaded environment or across Ruby processes. But, the Gibbler library by Delano Mandelbaum attempts to fix this by adding a #gibbler method to most objects which will consistently identify each instance.

Andrew Cholakian put out an interesting idea last week, which was to put your production application's Git SHA hash directly into each HTTP response. This approach lets you know exactly what code revision your systems are running on, and with curl (or any other simple HTTP application), you can pull that SHA and use it in normal git commands. Need to know if that last change actually made it onto to your servers?

Last week, Envy Labs released the Rails for Zombies Keynote presentation used in the instruction for Rails for Zombies. It's been put out to let the community use them for their own trainings, translate them into their own languages, and hopefully to help the community dub or subtitle the training videos, as well.